A computer data center contains a variety of equipments such as servers, telecommunication equipments, networking equipments, storage equipments, switches and other electronic equipments arranged in racks or frames.
The major challenge for a data center manager is to ensure appropriate cooling of various critical equipments at minimum electricity expenditure. The heat generated by electronic equipments in a data center is cooled with the help of cooling units, such as Computer Room Air Conditioners (CRAC) or Computer Room Air Handlers (CRAH). While implementing effective thermal management for equipment cooling, one of the challenging problems is to prevent the mixing of the cold air with the hot air before it reaches to servers, equipments and so on.
Various approaches have been attempted to address the equipments cooling problem, wherein most of the prior art relates to the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation study. Yet most of them are related to the simulation for the cluster of racks or a part of the data center without considering the data center as a whole in an integrated way. The containment is the ultimate solution to address the above mentioned mixing problem, which has been suggested in the prior art. The containment design includes but is not limited to locations and placement of containment panels, perforated tile configurations, rack load distribution, blanking panel's location and placement, CRAC positions and so on. To effectively deal with equipments cooling problem related to mixing, various designs have been suggested in the prior art for the containment. However, if the containment is implemented without assessing it's viability in terms of cooling requirements of various equipment, it can result in hot spots and can put the equipment at risk. A methodology for systematic and risk free enablement of containment and for the selection of the optimal design of containment is yet to be addressed.
Hence there is a need for a method and system which could enable design of a viable containment, and help in its implementation. Some of the existing method and systems known to us are as follows:
Prior arts US2011/0108207A1, US2008/0181908A1, US2010/0188816A1, and 2010/0061057 A1, talks about containment panel placement and mostly related to intricacies of containment panel geometrical details.
Great Lakes Case and Cabinet in “Computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling of containment solutions” focuses on one particular containment design and finds that containment reduces the overall temperature of the data center. However, it does not provide a method or possible containment design for a particular data center. It merely provides the thermal and flow profile of the data center after the implementation of containment, and provides a general guideline for the containment.
Goren in “Cold aisle containment system performance simulation” and Hilss and Iyer in “Improved data center efficiency—incorporating air stream containment” are focusing on placement of the containment geometry/system. A number of containment geometries for the cold and the hot aisle containment have been suggested. However, the prior art is lacking in figuring out the actual implementation of the containment design without rigorous consideration of its impact on the thermal and flow profile which could affect server performance and may even lead to failure.
A large number of researchers have used CFD based methodology for design and operational optimization of data center. A review article by Rambo and Joshi also provides an excellent summary of such efforts.
The majority of prior art relates to carrying out the modeling either in a CFD, regression or a mixed modeling framework. Although some of the above prior arts deal with the energy efficiency in one or another way. They fail to disclose to disclose an efficient method and system for determining a viable containment design of a data center and systematic implementation of the determined containment design. Thus, in the light of the above mentioned background art, it is evident that, there is a need for a method and system that determines a viable containment design of a data center and provide a method for systematic implementation of the determined containment design.